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To what purpose all this, but to show that the difference, so observable in men's understandings and parts, does not arise so much from the natural faculties as acquired habits? He would be laughed at that should go about to make a fine dancer out of a country hedger, at past fifty. And he will not have much better success who shall endeavor at that age to make a man reason well, or speak handsomely, who has never been used to it, though you should lay before him a collection of all the best precepts of logic or oratory. Nobody is made any thing by hearing of rules, or laying them up in his memory; practice must settle the habit of doing, without reflecting on the rule; and you may as well hope to make a good painter or musician, extempore, by a lecture and instruction in the arts of music and painting, as a coherent thinker, or strict reasoner, by a set of rules, showing him wherein right reasoning consists.

This being so, that defects and weakness in men's understand ings, as well as other faculties, come from want of a right use of their own minds, I am apt to think the fault is generally mislaid upon nature, and there is often a complaint of want of parts, when the fault lies in want of a due improvement of them. We see men frequently dexterous and sharp enough in making a bargain, who, if you reason with them about matters of religion, appear perfectly stupid.

INJUDICIOUS HASTE IN STUDY.

The eagerness and strong bent of the mind after knowledge, if not warily regulated, is often a hinderance to it. It still presses into farther discoveries and new objects, and catches at the variety of knowledge, and therefore often stays not long enough on what is before it, to look into it as it should, for haste to pursue what is yet out of sight. He that rides post through a country may be able, from the transient view, to tell in general how the parts lie, and may be able to give some loose description of here a mountain and there a plain, here a morass and there a river; woodland in one part and savannas in another. Such superficial ideas and observations as these he may collect in galloping over it; but the more useful observations of the soil, plants, animals, and inhabitants, with their several sorts and properties, must necessarily escape him; and it is seldom men ever discover the rich mines without some digging. Nature commonly lodges her treasures and jewels in rocky ground. If the matter be knotty, and the sense lies deep, the mind must stop and buckle to it, and stick upon it with labor and thought, and close contemplation, and not leave it until it has mastered the difficulty and got possession of truth. But here, care must be taken to avoid the other extreme. a man must not stick at every useless nicety, and expect myste

ries of science in every trivial question or scruple that he may raise. He that will stand to pick up and examine every pebble that comes in his way, is as unlikely to return enriched and laden with jewels, as the other that travelled full speed. Truths are not the better nor the worse for their obviousness or difficulty, but their value is to be measured by their usefulness and tendency. Insignificant observations should not take up any of our minutes; and those that enlarge our view, and give light towards further and useful discoveries, should not be neglected, though they stop our course, and spend some of our time in a fixed attention.

IMPORTANCE OF MORAL EDUCATION.

Under whose care soever a child is put to be taught during the tender and flexible years of his life, this is certain; it should be one who thinks Latin and languages the least part of education; one who, knowing how much virtue and a well-tempered soul is to be preferred to any sort of learning or language, makes it his chief business to form the mind of his scholars, and give that a right disposition; which, if once got, though all the rest should be neglected, would in due time produce all the rest; and which, if it be not got, and settled so as to keep out ill and vicious habitslanguages, and sciences, and all the other accomplishments of education, will be to no purpose but to make the worse or more dangerous man.1

THE RIGHT IMPROVEMENT OF HISTORY.

The stories of Alexander and Cæsar, farther than they instruct us in the art of living well, and furnish us with observations of wisdom and prudence, are not one jot to be preferred to the his tory of Robin Hood, or the Seven Wise Masters. I do not deny but history is very useful, and very instructive of human life; but if it be studied only for the reputation of being an historian, it is a very empty thing; and he that can tell all the particulars of Herodotus and Plutarch, Curtius and Livy, without making any other use of them, may be an ignorant man with a good memory, and with all his pains hath only filled his head with Christmas tales. And, which is worse, the greatest part of history being made up of wars and conquests, and their style, especially the Romans, speaking of valor as the chief if not the only virtue, we are in

1 "Next in rank and in efficacy to that pure and holy source of moral influence-the mother-is that of the schoolmaster. It is powerful already. What would it be if, in every one of those schooldistricts which we now count by annually increasing thousands, there were to be found one teacher well-informed without pedantry, religious without bigotry or fanaticism, proud and fond of his profession, and honored in the discharge of its duties! How wide would be the intellectual, the moral influence of such a body of men. But to raise up a body of such men, as numerous as the wants and dignity of the country demand, their labors must be fitly remunerated, and themselves and their calling cherished and honored.”—Discourse of Hon. Gulian C. Verplanck, of New York.

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danger to be misled by the general current and business of history; and, looking on Alexander and Cæsar, and such-like heroes, as the highest instances of human greatness, because they each of them caused the death of several hundred thousand men, and the ruin of a much greater number, overran a great part of the earth, and killed the inhabitants to possess themselves of their countries-we are apt to make butchery and rapine the chief marks and very essence of human greatness. And if civil history be a great dealer of it, and to many readers thus useless, curious and difficult inquirings in antiquity are much more so; and the exact dimensions of the Colossus, or figure of the Capitol, the ceremonies of the Greek and Roman marriages, or who it was that first coined money; these, I confess, set a man well off in the world, especially amongst the learned, but set him very little on in his way.

*

I shall only add one word, and then conclude: and that is, that whereas in the beginning I cut off history from our study as a useless part, as certainly it is where it is read only as a tale that is told; here, on the other side, I recommend it to one who hath well settled in his mind the principles of morality, and knows how to make a judgment on the actions of men, as one of the most useful studies he can apply himself to. There he shall see a picture of the world and the nature of mankind, and so learn to think of men as they are. There he shall see the rise of opinions, and find from what slight and sometimes shameful occasions some of them have taken their rise, which yet afterwards have had great authority, and passed almost for sacred in the world, and borne down all before them. There, also, one may learn great and useful instructions of prudence, and be warned against the cheats and rogueries of the world, with many more advantages which I shall not here enumerate.

ORTHODOXY AND HERESY.

The great division among Christians is about opinions. Every sect has its set of them, and that is called Orthodoxy; and he that professes his assent to them, though with an implicit faith, and without examining, is orthodox, and in the way to salvation. But if he examines, and thereupon questions any one of them, he is presently suspected of heresy; and if he oppose them or hold the contrary, he is presently condemned as in a damnable error, and in the sure way to perdition. Of this, one may say, that there is nor can be nothing more wrong. For he that examines, and upor a fair examination embraces an error for a truth, has done his duty more than he who embraces the profession (for the truths themselves he does not embrace) of the truth, without having examined whether it be true or no. And he that has done his duty accord

ing to the best of his ability, is certainly more in the way to hea ven than he who has done nothing of it. For if it be our duty to search after truth, he certainly that has searched after it, though he has not found it, in some points has paid a more acceptable obedience to the will of his Maker, than he that has not searched at all, but professes to have found truth, when he has neither searched nor found it. For he that takes up the opinions of any church in the lump, without examining them, has truly neither searched after nor found truth, but has only found those that he thinks have found truth, and so receives what they say with an implicit faith, and so pays them the homage that is due only to God, who cannot be deceived, nor deceive. In this way the seve ral churches (in which, as one may observe, opinions are preferred to life, and orthodoxy is that which they are concerned for, and not morals) put the terms of salvation on that which the Author of our salvation does not put them in. The believing of a collec tion of certain propositions, which are called and esteemed fundamental articles, because it has pleased the compilers to put them into their confession of faith, is made the condition of salvation.

DUTY OF PRESERVING HEALTH.

If by gaining knowledge we destroy our health, we labor for a thing that will be useless in our hands; and if, by harassing our bodies, (though with a design to render ourselves more useful,) we deprive ourselves of the abilities and opportunities of doing that good we might have done with a meaner talent, which God thought sufficient for us, by having denied us the strength to improve it to that pitch which men of stronger constitutions can attain to, we rob God of so much service, and our neighbor of all that help which, in a state of health, with moderate knowledge, we might have been able to perform. He that sinks his vessel by overloading it, though it be with gold, and silver, and precious stones, wil give his owner but an ill account of his voyage.

ROBERT SOUTH. 1633-1716.

DR. ROBERT SOUTH, a divine celebrated for his wit as well as his learning was born at Hackney, in Middlesex, in 1633, being the son of a London mer chant. He entered Westminster school, under Dr. Busby, in 1647, and on the day of the execution of Charles I., (January 20, 1649,) he read the Latin prayers in the school, and prayed for his majesty by name; apparently an indication that even then he had embraced those principles of attachment to the estab ushed form of government, in church and state, of which he was through all his life a most strenuous and able champion. In one of his sermons, for instance, he maintains that "kings are endowed with more than ordinary sa gacity ard quickness of understanding; they have a singular courage and

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presence of mind in cases of difficulty; and their hearts are disposed to virtu. ous courses. One is astonished that a man of learning and sense could be so blinded by party feeling as to utter such sentiments. But he was exceed. ingly violent in his feelings, continuing through life to pour forth upon all sects that dissente from the church of England, as well as upon all who doubted the "divine right" of kings to rule their subjects with unrestricted sway, his inexhaustible sarcasm, ridicule, and contempt. He died in 1716.

As a writer, Dr. South is conspicuous for good practical sense, for a deep insight into human character, for liveliness of imagination, and exuberant in vention, and for a wit that knew not always the limit of propriety. In perspicuity, copiousness, and force of expression, he has few superiors among English writers; which qualities fully compensate for the "forced conceits, unnatural metaphors, and turgid and verbose language which occasionally disfigure his pages."1

THE WILL FOR THE DEED.

The third instance in which men used to plead the will instead of the deed, shall be in duties of cost and expense.

Let a business of expensive charity be proposed; and then, as I showed before, that, in matters of labor, the lazy person could find no hands wherewith to work; so neither, in this case, can the religious miser find any hands wherewith to give. It is wonderful to consider how a command or call to be liberal, either upon a civil or religious account, all of a sudden impoverishes the rich, breaks the merchant, shuts up every private man's exchequer, and makes those men in a minute have nothing, who, at the very same instant, want nothing to spend. So that, instead of relieving the poor, such a command strangely increases their number, and transforms rich men into beggars presently. For, let the danger of their prince and country knock at their purses, and call upon them to contribute against a public enemy or calamity, then immediately they have nothing, and their riches upon such occasions (as Solomon expresses it) never fail to make themselves wings, and fly away.

But do men in good earnest think that God will be put off so! or can they imagine that the law of God will be baffled with a lie clothed in a scoff?

For such pretences are no better, as appears from that notable account given us by the apostle of this windy, insignificant charity of the will, and of the worthlessness of it, not enlivened by deeds: "If a brother or a sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?" Profit, does he say? Why, it profits just as much as fair words command the market, as good wishes buy food and raiment, and pass for current payment in the shops.

1 Read-an article in "Retrospecti ve Review," ix. 291.

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